Article here.
I looked up a couple terms before diving into the reading:
modality - noun: one of the main avenues of sensation
semiotics - noun: a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics
This section spoke volumes to me:
“In the past, and in many contexts still today, multimodal texts (such as films or newspapers) were organised as hierarchies of specialist modes integrated by an editing process. Moreover, they were produced in this way, with different hierarchically organised specialists in charge of the different modes, and an editing process bringing their work together. Today, however, in the age of digitisation, the different modes have technically become the same at some level of representation, and they can be operated by one multi-skilled person, using one interface, one mode of physical manipulation, so that he or she can ask, at every point: ‘Shall I express this with sound or music? Shall I say this visually or verbally? And so on.’”
So the digital age enables a lot of people to be a jack of all trades. But it's not just that, say, web designers have the *ability* to become the graphic designer, photographer, user interface designer, technical and copy writer. There is a growing *expectation* of this. When I started my position as manager of web-based communications, I had some coworkers wondering why I couldn't design the website by myself...write the web copy by myself...design graphical components by myself...take and edit the pictures by myself. And I can absolutely do a little bit (and in some cases a lot) of all these things.
But this multi-skilled (more like expertly multi-skilled) expectation is a little frightening. I might want to throw out the possibility of specializing in any one thing. Better learn it all if I want to continue to be competitive in this space.
The four strata of communication (just for reference)
Discourse - socially constructed knowledges of some aspect of reality.
Design - the means to realize discourses in the context of a given communication situation.
Production - the organization of the expression, to the actual material articulation of the semiotic event or actual material production of the semiotic artifact.
Distribution - the mode(s) of delivering the expression.
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